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Mandela is sworn in

Name: Mandela is sworn in
Start: 1994-05-10
Location: Union Buildings amphitheatre, Pretoria, South Africa

Union Buildings amphitheatre · Pretoria, South Africa · 1994-05-10

The inauguration at the Union Buildings was attended by more heads of state than any event in African history to that point.

The record

Date	1994-05-10
Place	Union Buildings amphitheatre, Pretoria, South Africa
Coordinates	-25.7407, 28.2129 (landmark-level precision)
Scope	World-historic
Sources	Wikipedia
Added	2026-08-14 · source: editors

Go deeper. This page records the place, the date and what is tied to them — the full story is told better elsewhere: Wikipedia. What you will not find there is this location’s other time layers, the map, and the memories readers add below.

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

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Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
National and municipal archives of South Africa, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

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Time layers at this place

One place, several moments in time. This location has 4 recorded time layers between 1948 and 1994 — slide through them:

1948

The 1948 election and apartheid

1964

The Rivonia Trial verdict

1977

The death of Steve Biko

1994

Mandela is sworn in

Seeded by the editors. This entry was compiled by us from public reference works and is labelled as such, not presented as a reader’s contribution. Sources are listed on the entry. If you know more, or we have it wrong, tell us — corrections are published.

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What readers have added

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Nearby in Africa

An event, not a property assessment. This page records what happened at a location. It says nothing about the condition, value or safety of any property there, and it is not part of any environmental record. Methodology and limits.